Thursday, July 17, 2008

beau mot plage

beau mot plage is live tomorrow.

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Wednesday, July 02, 2008

∆o hills park is live

∆o hills park is live now at threenovellasforanovel.com. The second novella of three novellas for a novel is released today for a limited time.

“∆o hills park - Based on the shocking true story of Super Free”

An early review of all three novellas from Sam Finnemore at the Listener, “Endless audacity”, is here.


“Disregard the digital presentation if you wish: with its defiant difficulty, sly ambition and writing more than sharp enough to live up to its own hype, Three Novellas is an event regardless, and a rare pleasure for fans of truly innovative local fiction.”


For free or more, it’s yours.


threenovellasforanovel.com

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Monday, June 16, 2008

“…startlingly…” - early review of, well, two novellas for a novel

Over at CCLAP, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, there’s a new review of three novellas for a novel, two thirds of it at least.


Sample text includes:

“...these shared-theme novellas, adding up to a mid-sized unified novel by the end (hence its title), are in fact designed for the top one-percent of most intelligent, most educated, most erudite readers out there, those who are fatally bored with almost every single other book on the market.... If you’re one of these people, you’re going to freaking love Three Novellas for a Novel; if you’re not, you’re going to likely wonder who this Shuker fellow thinks he is, calling this readable literature in the first place.”

“...a dense and trippy and highly atmospheric fever-dream of a tale...”

“...jarringly original ...”

“...unreadable...”

“...mental...”

“...startlingly...”

“...the...”

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Tuesday, June 03, 2008

forest is live

For your pleasure, the depleted forest, the first of three intertwined twenty-first-century horror stories to be published in serial for free or more, is now live at www.threenovellasforanovel.com/ - for just two more weeks until ∆O hills park arrives with all its madness mid-June. Novellas written, designed and laid out by me, web site design by Ryan Skelton at the Chop Shop with Junichiro Onuki deftly bevelling the tech.

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Monday, June 02, 2008

it’s coming up - more stuff

three novellas for a novel will give you a little taster for the fun to come in the next little while.

I’m just back from Beirut, Syria, Israel and the “Territories”, and in partnership with Ryan Skelton at the ChopShop, we’re readying three novellas for a novel for publication tomorrow. I’m trying to engineer paypal to accept zero dollars but it’s currently demanding at least a cent. This is just not the same thing.

the depleted forest goes live tomorrow. ao hills park goes live two weeks later (approximately, as I’m in Maine for some wedding-related fun June 10 to 19). beau mot plage goes live two weeks later.

Because I’m not a total hardass I’m going to leave up forest for a little overlap with park and then plage so latecomers can catch up.
It’s coming…

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Three Novellas for a Novel live

threenovellasforanovel.com

Limited edition illustrated download of three novellas in serial in june 2008 for free or more

“The Depleted Forest”

In which editor James Ballard, working in the concrete-cancer-riddled Tokyo of the near future, has a crisis over beating his Japanese mistress… To escape or resolve his confusion he rents a prostitute and heads to the hinterlands of Mount Fuji for a weekend of escapist sex, hippies and organic food amidst the remains of Aokigahara, the depleted floating “Sea of Trees”. But unwelcome memories intrude, as do the consequences of the cancer wiping out the Japanese skyline.

And Ballard has a letter waiting for him - someone very dangerous knows what he is doing to his mistress, and he begins to realize the story he is currently editing, of a boy named “Spoil the Child” and his terrific vengeance, may be his own story, and his undoing…

“∆O Hills Park”

In which we enjoy the machine-translated story of twelve-year-old orphan Spoil the Child and his older brother, who become quite willingly embroiled in the Japanese Ivy League rape and party club “I’m Your Man” under the leadership and malign influence of the dark nihilistic twenty-something witch-student “The Doubt Which Assaults"…

Spoil the Child trips up an American martial arts student at the top of the unforgiving stairs of Shinjuku station - the student’s fall to his death impresses the xenophobic Doubt Which Assaults, and provides the Child entrée into I’m Your Man’s world of privilege and wealth - privilege which extends to the consumption of people themselves…
“Based on the shocking true story of Super Free”


“Beau Mot Plage”

In which our narrator, a young and very pregnant American woman working as a model in Tokyo, stops off in London with her Japanese film professor husband, en route to the Cannes film festival. Bored with Breillat, she leaves her husband to his conference on transgressive cinema and heads to France, but at Nice airport she will have an accident that will leave her in Cannes during the festival a year later with no child and no memory of what happened, let alone how it came to be that she has money, a luxurious apartment prone to strange events (burned evidence in the armoire, footsteps above her, a child’s voice at a locked and sealed internal door) that give ominous clues as to what may have occurred…
Innocently, the amnesiac heads out to the film festival taking over the town, a festival to which James Ballard, who has dreamed her accident, and a twelve-year-old boy with revenge on his mind, seek attendance…

threenovellasforanovel.com

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Monday, April 07, 2008

Three Novellas for a Novel

Coming soon, Three Novellas for a Novel, online exclusive, to be published in serial here and here only for a limited time.

”The Depleted Forest”, ”∆O Hills Park” and ”Beau Mot Plage”.

More information to come…

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Sunday, January 13, 2008

The Lazy Boys (the feature film)

Happy new year to you all and the good news for 2008 is that the NZ Film Commission in their wisdom are funding a small guerilla team of highly motivated individuals - i.e., me, with brilliant director Brendan Donovan of the award-winning TV series The Insider’s Guide to Love and The Insider’s Guide to Happiness, plus short films HERE with Lee Majors and GRASP with the superb Dylan Baker, along with superproducer Michael Wrenn - who have been plotting this for more than a year - to begin making the low-budget, independent, under the radar, hard and fast feature film of THE LAZY BOYS.  I’m writing the screenplay as we speak, and consulting on creative stuff. Stay tuned. 

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Monday, December 10, 2007

Gotta do more. gotta be more

I am a terrible correspondent, I know. The reading at Manchester was a success - although I don’t think anybody knew who I was, I received a fantastic introduction from Vona Groarke, and Anna Smaill and Bill Manhire read exceptionally well - two new poems were particularly powerful. A ruptured eardrum and sowsed up to here with antibiotics meant I was less than charming and urbane at post-reading dinner and drinks with Bill, Anna, John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire of the Centre for New Writing and Cathy Bolton, director of the Manc. Literary Festival, but Amis/Eagleton antics blowing up at the time made for good conversation. (Check out the eminent Philip Hensher for a choice rebuttal of Eagleton’s ejaculations on Kingsley here at the Independent.) Reminds me of the Morrissey/NME fracas this last week.

I have been busy working fulltime at a job type job, getting ready to fly to New Zealand for Christmas in summer and oysters and wine on Waiheke beaches, and working on a screenplay for an independent feature film of THE LAZY BOYS. This is getting round so I may as well out it here. Check the Author page for some new collages I made, and current recommendations are the brilliant 30 DAYS OF NIGHT (starring “The Girl” as in “This is the girl” from Mulholland Drive, Melissa George), Zach Leader’s beautifully-put-together LIFE OF KINGSLEY AMIS, Jane Bowles’ Collected (a birthday gift from poet and academic Sandeep Parmar and The Wolf [plus check out the John Kinsella inteview on mp3 on the Wolf’s site - I was at the reading at Foyle’s and Kinsella is a brilliant, fiery, inspiring reader and environmental activist, though I can’t abide hemp boots]), and the huge indictment on the settlement project and the messianic drive to expansion in Judea and Samaria, Idith Zertal’s LORDS OF THE LAND, who I met and was wonderful, humble, self-effacing and brilliant (after Jacqueline Rose’s introduction she said, “Erm, thank you very much for your wholly exaggerated introduction. I think I should get up and leave now and leave you with that impression") and who signed my copy at the LRB Bookshop, and I was so tired and frazzled and a little starstruck I barely said anything, and Idith said to me, a propos of pretty much nothing, “A good writer is a good reader. You have to be a good reader.” Happy Christmas.

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Monday, May 07, 2007

Cannes and museumfilm

My friends are busy. Director CS Leigh’s museumfilm is up and live. 2004’s PROCESS with Beatrice Dalle is just astonishing and the long-delayed DVD release is now set for June.

I will be in Cannes for the 60th anniversary festival this year from the 16th of May till the 27th, with Anna and Ryan Skelton. This week the superb Michael FitzGerald is reading at KGB and Happy Ending in New York City - RADIANT DAYS was reviewed in the NYTBR.

In the UK Anna and I will be reading with Bill Manhire at the Manchester Literature Festival in October. And genius David Markson’s THE LAST NOVEL is published this month. The world is exciting.

Reading: Anthony Burgess’s gorgeous A DEAD MAN IN DEPTFORD. plus Mike Davis’s CITY OF QUARTZ, the elaborately bound and beautiful A LETTER FROM JAPAN, John Swope’s photographs. Wherein, having bought it for Swope’s photography of post-occupation Japan I found the shot of Brando from Julius Caesar that got me excited way back when I blogged for Powell’s.

As Malvolio puts it,
Why, every thing adheres together, that no dram of a scruple, no scruple of a scruple, no obstacle, no incredulous or unsafe circumstance—What can be said? Nothing that can be can come between me and the full prospect of my hopes.

To the dark house…

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Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Part three of the Rake’s Progress interview

Part three of the Rake’s Progress interview (the Rake split the first half and may do the second so there could be up to four instalments, god help us) with Michael Fitzgerald should be up in a day or two. I wrote a profile on Marty Amis for US Poets and Writers magazine recently, entitled “The Crown and the Crowd” (in reference to a great Amisianism I quote in full below) and the Martin Amis Web has posted this as a .doc over here in their reviews section The original magazine version rewards checking out for a superb photo of a louche looking Amis surveying his domains from a hotel window like a skinny Nero.

I am the only person in the world who likes YELLOW DOG. (The text messages aside.)

There’s a new dfw story at the New Yorker.

“Don’t do anything for the crowd. Don’t do anything with the crowd. But you’ve got to be aware of the crowd. In the novel I’m writing now (The Pregnant Widow), remembering the seventies, girls would go to bed with you even when they didn’t want to, because they were responding to the peer group. Very weird feeling. A girl going to bed with you for ideological reasons. You get that, and you also get, if you went out with a girl from up north, or from Cornwall or somewhere, she would have an actual rule about no sexual intercourse. She’s obeying an ideology of sort of save yourself for your husband, and a bit of religion and all that. So I formulate the rule, don’t do anything for the crowd. Don’t fuck, and don’t not fuck, for the crowd. Fuck for yourself.”

- Amis in conversation at the Prince Alfred

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Monday, March 05, 2007

Popmatters

Popmatters just posted a new review of The Lazy Boys. I’m on the lookout for the Xpressway Pileup compilation CD that came out in I think the early 90s. A Scottish label named Avalanche picked it up in the UK but I just can’t find it. Shane Carter does a truly beautiful Randolph’s Going Home.

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